The First Domino: Land Cover Mapping for Sustainability Initiatives

A land cover map tells you what is growing where, and whether forest has been cleared to grow it. For companies sourcing coffee, cocoa or palm, it sits beneath every sustainability commitment — used to verify deforestation-free sourcing, calculate FLAG emissions, and monitor supplier deforestation over time.

It is also the first domino. If it can’t reliably distinguish a coffee farm from a forest, every programme built on top of it is at risk.

This report explains how the problem happens and what to do about it.

What’s inside:

• Why standard forest datasets fail on coffee, cocoa and palm — and what that failure looks like in practice
• What EUDR actually requires from a land cover map, and why most datasets don’t qualify
• How the same data gap affects deforestation monitoring, emissions reporting and supplier investment simultaneously
• The five questions to ask any land cover data provider before using their map